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From One Moment to the Next, Wisconsin to Wall Street

Authors

journal

I was
brought to New York to make a few remarks about the Wisconsin Uprising at the
Creative Time Summit 3. Having just arrived in Manhattan, I found myself
catching a cab to Liberty and Broadway, urged in by a New York activist friend
who foresaw a Troy Davis protest march soon converging on the Occupy Wall
Street encampment in Zuccotti Park, a granite-blocked open space in the canyon
of the financial district. I made it there just in time
to see and hear the marchers bearing down on the occupied park.

THE
SYSTEM!IS RACIST!
THEY KILLED TROY DAVIS!

THE
SYSTEM!IS RACIST!
THEY LYNCHED TROY DAVIS!

This
was the chant in the air, in many voices as one, over and over. Troy Davis, an
African-American man sentenced to death for a murder he had likely not
committed, had been legally killed by the State of Georgia less than 24 hours
earlier, in the face of an international effort to grant Davis a stay of
execution. A hastily organized speak-out event in Union Square turned into an
impromptu march. The energy crested when hundreds of enraged protestors met up
with the Occupy Wall Street activists in the park.

It was
Thursday, September 22, and the occupation was going into its sixth night.
Although to a careless observer it might look like all the same people, this
was in fact an encounter of potential, between activist worlds not quite in
solid alliance. The marchers represented a part of the activist universe
different than the Occupy Wall Street campers—namely, the worlds of death
penalty abolition, wrongful conviction activism, prisoners’ rights groups, punk
anti-racism, human rights organizations, criminal justice reform work, and
efforts to end racial profiling and police brutality. Though many individual
activists are undoubtedly comfortable with different ways of thinking about
particular social injustices, the death penalty activists do not usually frame
their work against the problems of financialized capital. This is necessarily
true once you get beyond abstract analyses and bumper sticker sloganeering and
go into the concreteness of legal challenges, policy work, and legislative
reform.

By
contrast, the OWS encampment seemed to be populated mostly with young people newly
radicalized by the economic crisis, the debt burdens of themselves and their
parents, the evident wealth gaps, and the fast withering democracy in their
country, all foisted upon them in their formative years. I saw some graybeards
scattered around the plaza, but it was the early twenty-somethings, carrying
with them the slightest vibe of desperation, who made up the core.

The
temporary presence of the Troy Davis constituency, self-identified as having
been organized around and motivated by a political cause and movement with its
own discourse, history, political fronts, and priorities, raised the temptation
to speedily conflate one dissenting, outraged, and righteous segment of society
with another. On that evening, the articulation of an equivalence seemed to be
strangely and perhaps wisely resisted.
The momentary satisfactions of unity were shared through the aesthetic
experience, the surge of feeling that went through the combined crowd,
generated by the encounter between two groups of committed people, each
standing for radical social change. It made sense; there was not much to say,
as neither group had any further recourse, at least not at that stage. What
seemed most important was what in fact happened, that is, simply taking the
time to be together, to let communications run informally at the molecular
level, person-to-person, until the enlarged crowd eventually dissipated. This
episode is worth recounting because it prefigured some of the complexities of
Occupy Wall Street that we are seeing now, in the third week.

Over
the weekend part of my mind stayed on Wisconsin, for two reasons, neither being
the Creative Time gig. First, there was the inevitable comparison with OWS—I
could not help this, as the Wisconsin Uprising is now my movement frame of
reference, like it is for everybody from Madison, and possibly for today’s
labor movement as a whole. Second, being invested in the Wisconsin movement as
a resident of that state, of course I followed the two breaking state political
stories of that weekend: new coverage of the ongoing FBI corruption
investigation into the Walker regime, and the latest efforts by the regressives
to rewrite mining regulations in face of citizen and indigenous tribal
opposition.

In
regards to the first point, ie the comparison between OWS and the Wisconsin
Uprising, I tried to absorb the mood, setting, rhetoric, and activist profile,
and put all in relation to Wisconsin at the same one-week point. Of the many
differences, what strikes me now as probably the most consequential in terms of
movement character and future evolution, is the comparatively abstract target:
“Wall Street,” or “the banksters” or the 1%. In Wisconsin we have a central
figure, Governor Scott Walker, and a host of background players (the
Fitzgeralds, the Kochs, Paul Ryan, Alberta Darling, JB Van Hollen, etc), each
of whom is a real person who can be personally targeted. Most of them being
public figures, their career trajectories, at least, offer activists something
by which we can measure our strength. With OWS, the monster before us—the
banking structure, the corporate political system, and financialized capital in
its entirety—is so huge, global, faceless, out of control, and fundamentally
rotten, that it is difficult even for informed people to identify and
prioritize specific aims, much less individual targets.

As for
the second point, it is important to understand that even though the massive mediagenic
protests in Madison are long over,
the movement continues on any number of specific, localized and continually
unfolding fronts. Each of these battles requires resources and prolonged
attention. To lose focus on them is to lose the war, because it is in these
localized theaters that the actual implementation of the regressive agenda
happens. As OWS moves through a growth phase of insurgency in which
well-articulated generalities attract participants, and in which people
situated in very different contexts can recognize themselves and organize for
parallel uprisings, the other side of follow-through political struggle—the
tediousness, dedication, and minutiae of in-depth, localized research,
organizing, and action—must be expected and planned for. It is in the
particular instances of policy execution that the corruption from above touches
the ground, that is to say, where it is most readily witnessed, exposed,
directly confronted, and arrested.

My
feeling is, because OWS has from the beginning called into account a system
rather than persons or groups, compared to Wisconsin the movement has more long
term potential for growth and endurance. This is for two reasons, one obvious
and one less so. First, systems themselves are broad and endure, outlasting the
reach and careers of any single, embodied villain. Though it is true that
systems can crumble in amazingly short order, the conventional wisdom says
that, for example, the system we refer to as “Wall Street” will outlast Scott
Walker’s tenure as governor. As long as the target remains, the opposition, now
sparked, may as well.

The
less obvious reason is also less positive in the short term. The abstract truth
of the OWS critique reaches a limit on the ground. That is to say, the shared
reality of living under a single system can fuel a mass movement only until
that shared reality begins to fray in the uneven geography of capital. This
problem is exemplified by the second point related to Wisconsin above; who,
outside of the people of northern Wisconsin, knows or cares about the
devastation of long wall mining now looming over the Penokee Hills? Every
mining disaster, every home foreclosure, every supermax prison is sited in a
local context, against which it casts its most heavily weighted shadow,
rendering abstractions about systemic operations nearly moot. In Wisconsin it
is already an achievement in translocal activism that many people in southern
and urban areas have come to recognize the system as it takes this
particular form in another part of the state—and that is under the
comparatively unifying regime of the villain Walker. Thus the question for
OWS—and really any new US left formation of national scale—is how does the
movement embed within itself the function of articulation, as Laclau and Mouffe
define that term, and apply it to these problems of translocal activism?*

This
was the underlying challenge I perceived in the Troy Davis march-turned OWS
rally. How is Wall Street and the market theocracy it has imposed on the world
readable in the Troy Davis travesty, and in prison-related issues generally?
How can the one be articulated as the other, but in a way that preserves routes
into the untransferable realms of tedious and specialized campaigns that define
all of the specific, localized battles? These kinds of questions become more important
as different constituencies, each with its own history, demands, and ongoing
campaigns, joins OWS—an accelerating development as the occupation as of now
looks toward a fourth week. Clearly, grappling with the essential fluidity and
unfixed nature of the discursive identities that make up the socialist terrain,
within a movement context, presents short term challenges. Familiar fractures
are being voiced within OWS even as I write. But if properly negotiated, even
partially, the current internal challenge also hints at a long term possibility
we have not seen in the US since Seattle: a terrain of understood alliances
able to shift, divide, and reconstitute according to the uneveness of capital
itself. Again as Laclau and Mouffe might say, we will in time have before us a
field of moments, each one an instance and place of movement identity
only readable in relation to others, from northern Wisconsin to Occupy Wall
Street, to the world.

* “…we
will call articulation any practice establishing a relation among
elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory
practice.” Hegemony & Socialist Strategy, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal
Mouffe, p. 105.